Kobe, Tiger, Lindsey, Rita, First Amendment and more

A quick quiz. How are Kobe Bryant and I alike? For starters, let’s count the ways in which we’re not: he makes $25 million a year, has a cool nickname — Black Mamba — along with a way better jump shot and can dunk. The world has to be different for people who can dunk. I wouldn’t know. That two-handed dunk Wednesday night, in the second quarter of the Los Angeles Lakers’ loss (another loss) to the New Orleans Pelicans, apparently proved too much. Like me -- aha! -- he has a bad right shoulder. Him: torn rotator cuff. Me: torn labrum. Me: surgery last Thursday (thank you, Dr. Keith Feder). Kobe: got examined Friday, and now will be examined again Monday, probably out for the season if he, too, needs surgery.

Kobe, I feel your pain.

I can also recommend many excellent prescription drugs.

So many interesting things have been going on while I have been lying low. Tiger Woods flies to Italy, where he appears with a skeleton-patterned scarf and then a gap tooth. The Kenyan marathoner Rita Jeptoo shows up in Boston 2024 bid committee documents. Then there’s a crazy First Amendment issue in those same Boston documents.

And I’m the one who was on prescription meds?

Let’s start with Woods and significant other Lindsey Vonn. He flew to Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, to “surprise” her on the occasion of her winning her 63rd World Cup victory, most-ever by a female alpine skier.

To be clear: Lindsey Vonn is an amazing athlete. She deserves rounds of applause for this accomplishment, especially coming back from two knee injuries that kept her out of last year’s Sochi Olympics.

Vonn had recorded career win 62, tying Austria’s Annemarie Moser-Pröll, in Sunday’s downhill at Cortina. Victory 63 came in Monday’s super-G.

Cortina has always been one of Vonn’s favorite spots, along with Lake Louise, Canada. Nothing — repeat, nothing — is a given in alpine skiing. But it was hardly a surprise that she would win there.

Vonn’s family, in anticipation, had come to Cortina to share in her success.

It would have been kind of weird if Woods hadn’t been there, too, wouldn’t it?

Here's the thing: Woods doesn’t go anywhere without a security presence.

So he shows up. "Surprise"! But only on Monday, and trying to be all incognito-like, but then with the look-at-me skeleton scarf.

Strange, strange, strange.

Then, somehow the scarf drops, and there’s an Associated Press photo of him with the gap tooth.

“No way!” Vonn exclaimed when she saw him, according to press accounts. She also said, “I knew it was him immediately. He loves that stupid mask.”

Immediately, the gap tooth took virtually all the attention away from Vonn, and her accomplishment. The spotlight shifted to Woods.

His agent issued a statement that, in its entirety, read like this:

“During a crush of photographers at the awards’ podium at the World Cup event in Italy, a media member with a shoulder-mounted video camera pushed and surged towards the stage, turned and hit Tiger Woods in the mouth. Woods’s tooth was knocked out by the incident.”

Seriously?

We are to believe that Tiger Woods showed up at an event jam-packed with cameras and videographers and no one — not one single lens — captured this riveting action? It hasn’t yet shown up on TMZ? For real?

What is this, Cortina by Zapruder? A gap in the teeth but are there holes in the story? What?

As the expert alpine ski writer Brian Pinelli wrote in USA Today, quoting race secretary general Nicola Colli, “If you look at the pictures, there was no blood, nothing of pain in his face. He was calm, he was quiet.”

As for the statement itself from Woods’ agent — that’s it? You go to the effort of issuing a statement to the hungry press but there are no words of congratulations from Woods to Vonn? Just: some cameraman knocked out my tooth?

Further, and more to the point: it might be understandable why Woods — or Woods’ people — would want to villainize the media.

But Lindsey Vonn? What’s in that sort of play for her? Or U.S. Skiing?

She is the one cross-over star in winter sports. She is the one who, after all, got hurt and seized the opportunity to make a documentary out of it, which is showing Sunday on NBC. Football players get knee injuries all the time. Do they make documentaries out of their rehab? Of course not. Lindsey Vonn? Why not?

So what’s really going on here?

Very strange.

As was the decision by Boston 2024 organizers to include the photo of the marathoner Jeptoo in their bid presentation, the one that purportedly wowed the U.S. Olympic Committee board of directors.

Timeline: that presentation was made in December. Jeptoo, winner of the 2013 and 2014 Boston Marathons, among other major races, had tested positive in November for the banned blood-booster EPO.

Hard to understand how the USOC board could have been so wowed when her picture came up. Was anyone seriously paying attention?

Why didn’t Boston 2024 just go with Meb Keflezighi on that very same page, for goodness’ sake? After all, he’s an American, the 2014 Boston Marathon winner as well and the 2004 Athens marathon silver medalist.

Very strange.

The Boston 2024 documents, moreover, repeatedly observe that the city itself will be “Olympic Park” — for instance, “at the heart of the city, at its reinvented waterfront and in its cherished parks.”

It is understood that these documents are a “plan” and not a finished product. Even so, there is a real reason that in recent editions the International Olympic Committee has opted for real Olympic Parks.

The IOC has said time and again that security is priority No. 1. Olympic Parks are more easily, in a word, secure-able.

Think back to the last Summer Olympics in the United States, which featured tremendous open space in a major American city. Within the IOC, Atlanta 1996 is remembered mostly for its transport and technology woes, and for the bomb that went off in Centennial Park.

The less said here about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings the better. Just this: at this very preliminary stage, has anyone stopped seriously to think about the security implications of making the city of Boston “Olympic Park”?

Switching gears:

The provision that caused such controversy mid-week, when it was discovered that the USOC had included in its contract with Boston a non-disparagement provision — that is, city workers would not criticize the Games during the bid process -- this is very serious stuff.

Think back a year ago, before the Sochi 2014 Games, when much of the West was up in arms about a Russian law targeting “propaganda” aimed at gays.

Now the USOC writes into its deal with its chosen bid city a clause that would appear to fairly directly contravene not only the letter but the spirit of the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights? The fundamental thing that makes the United States different from so many places around the world?

This is not, despite anyone’s best efforts to explain it away as “boilerplate,” anything of the sort. This is a deliberate attempt to chill speech. It is not, in any way, acceptable.

Granted, the parallels are hardly precise -- but if you were Mr. Putin, wouldn't you find some ironic comedy in this episode, in the effort by the U.S. Olympic Committee, of all parties, to restrict free speech? Wouldn't that seem to him a little bit like a case of the pot calling the kettle black?

The Boston Globe was absolutely right in an editorial to insist that Mayor Marty Walsh and the bid committee drop that ban. The mayor has since seemingly been backtracking.

While that gets sorted out, mark your calendars: IOC president Thomas Bach is due to attend the Super Bowl next weekend in Arizona.

It will be fascinating to see whether he meets with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft — assuming, of course, the NFL doesn’t do what it should do, which is disqualify the Patriots for deflategate. If this were the Olympics, there's a very good argument to be made that the Patriots should be out and the Indianapolis Colts in. The evidence would seem manifest that the Patriots cheated.

At any rate, it was always understood that while the USOC was always in 2024 for one thing only, and that was to win, at the same time any American bid for 2024 was going to travel a long road. In that spirit, Bach met Wednesday — at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — with the head of the Italian Olympic Committee, Giovanni Malago, and the Italian premier, Matteo Renzi, to discuss Rome’s bid for the 2024 Games.

Renzi: “We can say that after this meeting the bid for the 2024 Olympic Games can continue with more enthusiasm.”

Very interesting.

For the record, and with enthusiasm: Kobe has more gold medals than I do. He also speaks way better Italian.

IAAF 2019, IOC 2022: why so different?

The International Olympic Committee’s Winter Games bid 2022 process is, to put it charitably, struggling. Six cities have dropped out. Just two are left, Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. At the very same time, the IAAF’s bid contest for the 2019 track and field world championship seemingly couldn’t be going better. On Friday, an evaluation commission, headed by Sebastian Coe, the 1980s track star who is an IAAF vice president and of course oversaw the 2012 London Summer Games, wrapped up a worldwide tour that took it across the world to the three cities in the race: Barcelona; Eugene, Oregon; and Doha, Qatar.

It’s almost impossible not to compare and contrast, and to wonder what the IAAF is obviously doing so right.

Because it’s not just 2019.

The 2013 world championships were in Moscow, at Luzhhniki Stadium, site of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1980 Summer Olympics; 2015 will be in Beijing, back at the Bird’s Nest; 2017 in London, at Olympic Stadium. There’s a good case to be made that the 2021 worlds will likely fall in Tokyo, to make use of the new Olympic Stadium there after the 2020 Games.

Absolutely, the IAAF is not perfect. Far from it. The 2013 worlds, in particular, were marked by attendance woes early in the championships. The 2011 worlds were in Daegu, South Korea, hardly one of your must-see tourist hot spots.

But even significant glitches such as these have hardly stopped some of the world’s great cities from lining up to bid for what is, after the Summer Games and FIFA’s World Cup, indisputably one of Olympic sport’s glamour events — a nine-day run featuring some of sport’s great stars, including the likes of sprinters Usain Bolt of Jamaica and American Allyson Felix and the French pole-vaulter Renaud Lavillenie.

If 2011 was in Daegu, remember, 2009 was in Berlin, at historic Olympic Stadium. And it was in 2009 in Berlin, on the blue track, that Bolt ran his signature world records: 9.58 in the 100, 19.19 in the 200.

Even the United States wants in for 2019, with Eugene launching the first American bid since Stanford’s 1999 and 2001 unsuccessful efforts.

No way Eugene is one of the world’s great cities. Absolutely it is one of the world's great college towns. It is also home to one of the most famous track facilities anywhere, venerable Hayward Field. This summer, it put on the IAAF junior championships.

Barcelona of course staged the 1992 Summer Olympics. More recently and relevantly, it played host to the 2010 European track and field championships and the 2012 IAAF juniors.

Doha put on the 2010 IAAF world indoors. It finished second, behind London, in the race for the 2017 outdoor worlds, and is due in the coming months and years to host any number of other championships, including short-course swimming (December), team handball (early 2015), gymnastics (2018) and, certainly, soccer’s World Cup in 2022.

Barcelona assuredly can count on support from track and field’s European center; Eugene would refurbish “iconic” Hayward; Doha would present the championships not in August but in late September and early October and, moreover, run the marathon at night under floodlights, conjuring up memories of Abebe Bikila at the Rome 1960 Summer Games.

To be clear, there are manifest differences between an Olympic Games and a track and field world championships.

An Olympics features multiple world championships all going on at the same time; an IAAF worlds is just one. An Olympics runs for 17 days; an IAAF worlds, only the nine. And so on.

Even so, an IAAF worlds — especially in comparison to a Winter Games — is still a pretty darn big deal. There were roughly 2,850 athletes from 89 countries at the Sochi 2014 Olympics. Moscow 2013, meanwhile, saw 1,974 athletes from 206 nations.

To underscore: a track world championships typically means an assembly of more nations than anywhere but a Summer Olympics.

The track championships are hugely international but manageable, not the sort of thing that requires a city or nation to undergo a perceived onerous investment. In short, it doesn’t cost, just to pick a number out of the blue sky, $51 billion.

Which everyone knows is what a Winter Games costs, right?

Oh, wait.

The IOC now stands poised in Monaco at an all-members session in December to assess president Thomas Bach’s review and potential reform session, dubbed “Agenda 2020.” That $51 billion figure, widely associated with the Sochi Games, is the number believed to have played a role, big or small, in scaring off the six cities now out of 2022 — Lviv, Stockholm, St. Moritz/Davos, Krakow, Munich and, most recently, Oslo.

Of course It’s more than that.

It is absolutely the case that in this last year of his presidency, the IAAF, under Lamine Diack, is in something of a holding pattern. It is also undeniably true that over the past 15 years track and field has seen more than its fair share of doping-related scandals, some involving its biggest stars.

The latest, which dropped Friday: a reported positive A test for Kenya’s Rita Jeptoo, winner the last two years of both the Boston and Chicago marathons.

None of this, however, has stopped cities from wanting its biggest event — including the robust campaign going on now for 2019.

Why? Because for all its flaws, and there are many, track and field is and forever will be the sport, the one nearly everyone can do, the one that despite its highly professionalized nature remains the “vintage” sport — if you will — of the movement.

It is, despite everything, elemental.

All of this is part and parcel of the underlying contest within the 2019 contest, which all involved with track and field are keenly aware — one for 2019, the other the looming contest for the IAAF top job.

Coe has been the point man for the evaluation commission.

Meanwhile, his presumed rival for the IAAF presidency, Ukraine’s Sergey Bubka, the 1980s and ‘90s pole vault star, himself another IAAF vice president who is also a member of the IOC executive board, has been simultaneously traveling the world.

While Coe was in Doha, there was Bubka in Algeria, meeting with top African Olympic and track officials and tweeting about it.

Official dinner hosted by Mr Palenfo. Reporter asks how I feel in #Africa. I feelhere like I'm at home' @ACNOA_ANOCA pic.twitter.com/zRpCFk9Dgw

— Sergey Bubka (@sergey_bubka) October 30, 2014

When Diack -- who is from Senegal -- approached Coe to head the evaluation commission, meantime, close observers took that as an unmistakable signal about what in the world of track and field is what. For his part, through the October tour of Spain, Oregon and Qatar, Coe has stressed time and again that he is fulfilling this role in service to the IAAF.

For those who wondered if this world tour was going to be all about Coe -- no. To reframe Meghan Trainor’s hit song — it’s all about the bids.

To be honest, Coe has to do it this way, all the while being completely upbeat about all three cities — because, at the 2019 election Nov. 18 in Monaco, there is going to be one winner and two who go home empty-handed. Any perceived negativity anytime, anywhere — that wouldn’t serve anyone in that position well for the presidential election next August in Beijing.

This shadow dance is reaching a stage where the two undeclared candidates, Coe and Bubka, should soon be publicly forthcoming about their intentions — perhaps at the IAAF gala in Monaco in November, the same week as the 2019 elections, or soon thereafter.

Which leads back to the IOC.

The fix the IOC has got itself in has to be seen big picture.

When Juan Antonio Samaranch was president, from 1980 until 2001, one of the most clever — and under-appreciated — aspects of his tenure was to “hide” the Games themselves behind the concept of the movement.

The movement was all. The Games, while essential, were simply part of the overarching movement.

Under Jacques Rogge, whose term stretched from 2001 until 2013, this scenario switched.

The Games achieved primacy.

The unintended consequence:

By putting the Games first, the IOC is now increasingly seen worldwide as an event-maker — to take it further, an event-maker in a business where money, not the stories of the athletes, has become a central concern.

This was perhaps unavoidable after Games in Beijing ($40 billion-plus) and Sochi ($51 billion).

Regardless — it is profoundly unfortunate.

Money, though necessary, is not at all the IOC’s mission: it is to move the world forward, little by little, piece by piece, day by day, through one-to-one change via the athletes and the young people of the world. The shorthand for all this is expressed through the key Olympic values: friendship, excellence, respect.

A few voices would be eager — who are even now trying — to say what the IOC is truly about.

Why are those voices not being heard? Because the IOC is an easy target. And because the IOC is not telling its side of the story clearly, concisely or even well.

In politics, especially sports politics, it’s a raw truth that the truth matters — but what matters more is perception.

Perception is what is dragging at the IOC.

The IOC has a chance to effect significant change at that Monaco session, though with Bach announcing recently that bid-city visits by the members won’t be considered anew it’s not clear how far any real reform might stretch.

In the meantime, the IAAF — despite its figurative hurdles — heads into its November election for 2019 in a position of considerable strength. And seemingly poised, with a new generation of leadership at the ready, to grow the sport further.

At the closing news conference Friday in Doha, Coe was naturally asked about 2022, and the many allegations around the soccer tournament there.

“We came here to make a judgment about the worthiness of the city to stage a track and field championships,” he said, “so our focus has been entirely of this city and the other two cities to deliver this championships.

“We haven’t spent, and nor should we spend, any time worrying about other sports and other situations."

Coe praised each of the three 2019 cities. He also said the one that wins will be “the one in position to present the sport in the best possible light,” adding, “We are looking for a city that understands why it wants to host [the championships]."